Walking Through Sheol
by ArkTaisch
Summary: Before he was the Doctor, he was Theta Sigma, the only student at the Time Lord Academy reckless enough to break into the Cloisters. (Written for the Writers Anonymous Forum's All Dialogue/Narrative Challenge)


The first thing he jettisoned was his name.

He knew, as they all did, that the Cloisters were guarded by wraiths of dead Time Lords, watch dogs that hunted by telepathy. Floating in eerie silence through the labyrinthine passageways, the so-called Sliders scented out rogue identities and assimilated them — lethally. Therefore he silenced his thoughts and slunk through the darkness, mimicking the dead as closely as anything with two living heartbeats could.

Emptied of his name, the intruder's mind filled with mocking epithets. Drylander. Shobogan. Oldblood. Idiot. Cack-handed nuisance. And lately, the one that drove him to risk life and sanity in these crypts beneath the Capitol: the Hybrid.

It had been a joke at first. Biodata analysis was a standard exercise in the Academy curriculum, with the students using themselves as the subjects. Bored with the simplified heuristics taught in the introductory class, a few of the more enterprising students experimented with more sophisticated techniques. That was when the anomalies in Theta Sigma's biodata became common knowledge — anomalies he had been clever enough to find, but not clever enough to hide.

A few anomalies meant nothing until someone thought to correlate them to certain dark legends — word of mouth that had circulated the dusty halls of the Academy since time immemorial. Even so, they were only stories, nothing more than rejected Matrix projections adopted by senior students seeking to frighten the youngsters. The Hybrid was just another Gallifreyan boogeyman, like Zagreus or the Great Vampires.

It never meant anything until he ran away in such stark terror that his fellow students wondered if there was some grain of truth in the stories after all. He didn't know why he had been so terrified, and that scared him even more. It was as if he was missing a piece of his soul. He felt himself to be a hollow shell, and if he allowed himself to think about it, he was terrified of what monsters might creep in to fill that void.

All nonsense. He knew it was nonsense. He might not be the scion of a prestigious house, but here at the Academy, none of that was supposed to matter. He was a student like any other. He would follow the same path as everyone else, and graduate into the same dull existence as every other Time Lord. Yet sometimes, he found that fate just as terrifying as the other. The more so because it was _real_ , and the other was the product of his fevered imagination.

Nevertheless, he burned with the need to know which fate was the truth. It was a question that couldn't even be asked without casting doubt on the stability of Time Lord society. Everyone knew that Gallifrey was eternal, Gallifrey was everything. Legends and dark prophecies were locked away in the vaults of the Matrix because they could never be real. The sanitized projections released to the Time Lords showed a future indistinguishable from the present, forever.

Doubt drove him to seek the truth from the source. Locked away in the depths of the Cloisters, the Eye of the Axis was said to hold all the secrets too dangerous for the living to know. Dangerous. Forbidden. Guarded by the dead. None of that stopped him from taking the lift down to the lowest level — accessible only by hacking the control panel — and stepping out the door.

But now that he was here, he had no idea where to find the Eye of the Axis. The dim corridors of the Cloisters stretched on, an endless tangle of cables and crumbling walls. Once-living creatures were wired in haphazardly, lying where they had been caught by the Sliders. Now they served for eternity, slaves to the computational demands of the Matrix. _That_ would be his fate if he wasn't careful.

He was careful. At first.

He didn't know how long he had been wandering. Each moment was a dry, cracked layer painted over jumbled blocks of misplaced time. Matrix doors were everywhere. Some were obvious, while others were sly things, sneaking up unnoticed to hurtle the unwary intruder into nightmarish projections — futures that frightened even the dead.

In the end, inevitably, the Sliders caught the scent of his purpose. Their screaming faces oriented on him, and the random vectors of their motion shifted to converge on his location. Soon they closed in, forcing him to run where they dared not follow. He plunged through a door into a maybe-when, the shrieks of the wraiths still echoing in his thoughts.

The old city spread before him, its architecture grown baroque. Weeping Angels studded every roofline, snarled across every gate. They weren't real. But he was here, and that made them real. Not daring to blink, he crept through the illusion, neck sore from the effort to keep an eye in every direction.

Closer, ever closer, they came for him. Statues with claws, statues with teeth, statues shifting closer each time his gaze faltered. He didn't know what would happen if they caught him. Would he be sent back to a time that never existed, to die in years that would never be? Or would he become part of the projection forever? He remembered the trapped creatures he had tiptoed past, preserved corpses overgrown with the living cables of the Cloisters. Would he even notice when his mind was absorbed into the Matrix?

As he delved deeper into the projection, the city crumbled around him into ruins. Somewhere there must be an exit, but he could neither find it nor be assured of recognizing it if he did. All he could do was scramble blindly over broken walls, hoping that rougher terrain could slow the advance of the quantum-locked monsters. But the angels knew the city better than he did, and herded him into a dead end.

Polished stone rose up in front of him, too high and smooth to climb. He turned to find the Weeping Angels blocking his retreat, their wings flared in anticipation of the kill. His eyes watered with the effort of keeping them open. As long as he didn't blink, they couldn't move. He calculated his odds of threading a path through them — not good. He stared out at the frozen army. How could they have infiltrated Gallifrey so thoroughly? Where had they come from? It seemed an improbable scenario, and if he died here, he would never know more. Were there no Time Lords left? He thought not, judging by the decay and the silence that encompassed air and thought alike. He was alone here.

He was wrong.

Wavering like a mirage, the silhouette of a Time Lord in winged collar and robes appeared in the distance. As it approached, it took on color and substance. He thought at first it was some teacher from the Academy, sent to retrieve their wayward truant. Then he saw the distorted face inside the collar— a Slider!

Impossible. They never entered the projections. But that inhuman glide was unmistakable, and headed straight for him. The creature passed through the Weeping Angels as easily as one might through a hologram.

Was it that simple? But when he tried it on the nearest statue, he found it solid to the touch. In that moment of distraction, the Weeping Angel to his left fell out of his field of view, and he was caught. Stone fingers locked around his wrist. A hand hung mid-air, halfway to his face. He hissed in consternation, trying and failing to wrench free. He could only watch helplessly as the Slider approached.

It was _muttering_. He strained to make out the words, but the syllables ran into each other in a meaningless string of numbers. They had a viral quality, taking root in his thoughts so thoroughly that the Slider had moved straight past him before he noticed.

 _Moved past him and into the wall..._

And where its robes brushed his fingertips, the angel's grip seemed to loosen. It wasn't real. None of this was real. Somehow, the muttered gibberish had shifted his perceptions enough to break free. Before the projection could solidify around him again, he threw himself after the Slider. He called out after it, but it continued on without slowing. He broke into a run, panting breathlessly by the time he caught up. Though the Slider never ceased its muttering nor even turned its head, the numbers seemed to expand to accommodate the intruder, including him in its local field of reality. The projection had faded around them into a formless darkness, and then they were in the Cloisters again.

He was wary at first, but to his relief, the other Sliders shied off from approaching what he had come to think of as 'his' Slider, and 'his' Slider made no attempt to capture him. Instead, its muttering took on the quality of a one-sided dialogue, and he imagined himself in conversation with it. Perhaps he was going mad. Or perhaps it understood his purpose and approved. He gambled on the latter and stuck close to its shadow, following wherever it chose to lead.

It was an impossible path. He would never have found it on his own. Doors opened that wouldn't have existed for him, doors called into existence by the Slider's muttered calculations. Solid stone revealed service shafts, then morphed into tunnels even more ancient. At last came the rift, a chasm so deep that it could swallow an empire whole — as it had done once.

As if summoned by the Slider's gibberish, the memory took shape in his mind's eye. He saw for a moment the empress-oracle hanging in her basket. Then the rope was cut and she was swallowed forever by history. On this side of the rift stood rational, ordered Gallifrey. Banished to the other side, the chaos of the Old Time.

There was no bridge. The Slider hovered in empty air, nothing but darkness beneath it. Supported by what? The strength of its mumbled nonsense? The numbers tugged at him, insisting that he follow, that the answers he sought were on the other side. For a moment, he could only gape in disbelief. There was no bottom to that chasm. To fall was to lose himself forever. But on the other side... was it true? Did the Eye of the Axis lurk in the distant past? How much did he want to know?

He had to know. He couldn't go back, only forward. He shut his eyes, held his breath, and stepped out into emptiness.

There was a bridge!

There was a bridge, and on the other side, shining in the darkness, grew the multifaceted jewel of prophecy: the Eye of the Axis. It was an artifact of complex dimensionality and amorphous reality. The Slider had come to a halt at its periphery. Waiting.

Bracing himself, the intruder edged forward. Half a step later, he found himself swallowed up inside the Eye. It was no single crystal, but rather a convoluted lattice holding uncountable billions of individual data cubes. He reached for the closest, but his hand slid through it without contact. A whisper of warning at the edge of his mind gave him the explanation: a safety measure set by whoever had designed the Eye.

He hadn't come this far to be deterred by _safety measures_. Closing his eyes, he forced the contact, focusing his search on the prophecies of the Hybrid. At first he felt nothing but an ominous tension — another warning to turn back. He ignored it, pushing on.

Then the Eye opened, and it was as if a sip of water had turned into a raging torrent washing him over a cliff. Potential futures flashed through his mind in an impossible jumble. He saw himself in some, while others contained nothing recognizable. Worlds _burned_ in his sight, some at his own hand. He screamed wordless denial, but could no longer find any way out of the visions.

It was the Slider who wrenched him free. Shivering, lost, he tried to remember why he had come here. Feeling something hard-edged digging into his palm, he looked down at his hand, forcing his fingers open to reveal a single data cube. Was this what he had been seeking? He peered into its memory.

It was empty.

In numb incomprehension, he let the Slider lead him away. It began muttering once more. But this time, the numbers were muddled in with memories that mixed uneasily with the ones already in his head. By the time they reached the land of the living again, he couldn't tell if it was even the same world he had left. It seemed now that he was the one leading the Slider out. How had that happened? Confused, he looked behind him to ask, but he was alone.

Alone, mind shattered by the journey, data cube clenched in his fist, he stumbled aimlessly through the bowels of the Capitol. It was his friend Koschei who found him collapsed in a dingy alleyway. Koschei took him home and whatever they said to each other that night was lost to paradox. As for the data cube stolen from the Eye of the Axis, it was never seen again.

In the morning, the student known as Theta Sigma returned to the Academy, but his absence went unremarked, and he slipped from the notice of most of his peers and teachers. Another now carried the burden of his house's name: Irving Braxiatel — Braxiatel the brilliant, Braxiatel the ambitious. As Braxiatel's feckless younger brother, Theta was seen (if he was seen at all) as an afterthought, scraping through his exams with a minimal passing score. He was a little mad, a little untrustworthy, and no longer answered reliably to his own name.

When in time he stole his granddaughter and a TARDIS and went renegade, no one was surprised, nor did anyone consider him important enough to pursue. Whatever dust of prophecy had clung to him was forgotten along with the name of Theta Sigma.

He was the Doctor, and that was destiny enough.

* * *

 **Author's note:** Canon, what canon? This story is based on events alluded to in S09E12 ("Hell Bent"), with additional elements brought in from the books and audios. Technically part of my "Gallifreyan Tyr-ridan" AU continuity, but there's no explicit linkage. (This incident corresponds to the bit in _God Stalk_ where Penari and Jame steal the other Eye of Abarraden, which means Braxiatel = Penari! Let's not overthink that one...)


End file.
